A choir is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the medieval era to the present, or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm, hand, and facial gestures.
The Mass in B minor, BWV 232, is an extended setting of the Mass ordinary by Johann Sebastian Bach. The composition was completed in 1749, the year before the composer's death, and was to a large extent based on earlier work, such as a Sanctus Bach had composed in 1724. Sections that were specifically composed to complete the Mass in the late 1740s include the "Et incarnatus est" part of the Credo.
SATB is an initialism that describes the scoring of compositions for choirs, and also choirs of instruments. The initials are for the voice types: S for soprano, A for alto, T for tenor and B for bass.
Andrew Parrott is a British conductor, perhaps best known for his pioneering "historically informed performances" of pre-classical music. He conducts a wide range of repertoire, including contemporary music. He conducted the premiere of Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera. He has also recorded new music by other modern British composers, and by Vladimír Godár.
Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, is a cantata for Easter by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, one of his earliest church cantatas. It is agreed to be an early work partly for stylistic reasons and partly because there is evidence that it was probably written for a performance in 1707. Bach went on to complete many other works in the same genre, contributing complete cantata cycles for all occasions of the liturgical year. John Eliot Gardiner described it as Bach's "first-known attempt at painting narrative in music".
Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?, BWV 8, is a church cantata for the 16th Sunday after Trinity by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is a chorale cantata, part of Bach's second cantata cycle. Bach performed it for the first time on 24 September 1724 in St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. The cantata is scored for SATB singers, four wind instruments, strings and continuo.
Joshua Rifkin is an American conductor, pianist, and musicologist; he is currently a professor of music at Boston University. As a performer he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas, and as a scholar has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century.
Sigiswald Kuijken is a Belgian violinist, violist, and conductor known for playing on period and original instruments.
Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106, also known as Actus tragicus, is an early sacred cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in Mühlhausen, intended for a funeral.
Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36, in Leipzig in 1731 for the first Sunday in Advent. He drew on material from previous congratulatory cantatas, beginning with Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36c (1725). The Gospel for the Sunday was the Entry into Jerusalem, thus the mood of the secular work matched "the people's jubilant shouts of Hosanna". In a unique structure in Bach's cantatas, he interpolated four movements derived from the former works with four stanzas from two important Advent hymns, to add liturgical focus, three from Luther's "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland" and one from Nicolai's "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern". He first performed the cantata in its final form of two parts, eight movements, on 2 December 1731.
Notable recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion (Matthäus-Passion) are shown below in a sortable table.
Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 131, is a church cantata by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. It was composed in either 1707 or 1708, which makes it one of Bach's earliest cantatas. Some sources suggest that it could be his earliest surviving work in this form, but current thinking is that there are one or two earlier examples.
The listing shows recordings of the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, by Johann Sebastian Bach. The selection is taken from the 281 recordings listed on the Bach Cantatas Website as of 2018, beginning with the first recording by a symphony orchestra and choir to match, conducted by Albert Coates. Beginning in the late 1960s, historically informed performances paved the way for recordings with smaller groups, boys choirs and ensembles playing period instruments, and eventually to recordings using the one-voice-on-a-vocal-part scoring first argued for by Joshua Rifkin in 1982.
Recordings of the St John Passion are shown as a sortable table of selected notable recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion, BWV 245. The selection is taken from the 241 recordings listed on bach-cantatas as of 2015.
Frieder Bernius is a German conductor, the founder and director of the chamber choir Kammerchor Stuttgart, founded in 1968. They became leaders for historically informed performances. He founded the Stuttgart festival of Baroque music, "Internationale Festtage Alter Musik", in 1987, and is a recipient of the Edison Award (1990), Diapason d'Or (1990) and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1993).
The Mass in B minor is Johann Sebastian Bach's only setting of the complete Latin text of the Ordinarium missae. Towards the end of his life, mainly in 1748 and 1749, he finished composing new sections and compiling it into a complex, unified structure.
Dunedin Consort is a baroque music ensemble based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Much has been written about Bach's ensembles that he used.
This article includes a list of commercial recordings of the motets of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach motets have often been recorded as a set. However, other motets are attributed to Bach and there is some doubt about the authorship of Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden, BWV 230, one of the BWV "six".
This is a list of recordings of Bach's cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, BWV 56, a solo cantata for bass or bass-baritone composed for the 19th Sunday after Trinity, first performed on 29 October 1726. In English, it is commonly referred to as the Kreuzstab cantata.
